From last night’s actually rather good “2014 – The Rory Review”:
BBC Scotland has 1,250 staff and an annual budget of just over £100 million. Yikes. We’re going to need a bigger fundraiser.
Since the demise of the Nintendo DS, I've done almost all of my videogaming on smartphones and tablets. A confluence of circumstances made traditional console formats less attractive for a variety of reasons, but also saw me spend more money on gaming than I had done in years. iOS and Android games offer a huge range of incredibly good titles at mindbogglingly tiny prices, almost all of them capable of fitting into whatever free time you have available.
(And not just because they're short, snappy arcade twitch games like Super Hexagon or Impossible Road. Classics like Civilisation and Shadowrun have been revived brilliantly to suit the format, and traditional genres such as scrolling shooters have actually been improved by touchscreen controls, with the likes of Dodonpachi and Raiden rendered far more player-friendly without reducing their fearsome difficulty one iota. Pinball games and others can finally get the aspect ratio they've always wanted.)
More to the point, it almost never takes 47 days to download one.
The Independent, 22 December 2014:
We can only admire Mr Murphy’s ambition.
Libby Brooks in today’s Guardian:
The swing implied by the figures suggests that as many 10 Labour seats [sic] could fall to the SNP.”
But that’s not what the figures suggest at all.
Fans of the bewildering in Scottish politics don’t look set to be disappointed in 2015.
Jim Murphy’s only been the Scottish Labour “leader” for a week, but already he seems hell-bent on hurling the party’s North British branch into the padded walls of its cell with more vigour than ever before, heroically ignoring the open door.
Iain Macwhirter in “Disunited Kingdom” (Cargo Publishing, 8 December 2014):
It’s a difficult assessment to dispute.
We thought you might like a wee glimpse into the machinery.
By now readers will probably be familiar with STV News reporter Stephen Daisley’s superbly withering review of Alan Cochrane’s referendum diaries. One quote from the book aroused particular interest:
According to Cochrane, the Canadian economist told the First Minister: ‘I’m only here for one day, Alex, but don’t f— with me or I’ll be up here a lot more often.’“
But did that really happen?
Political etiquette is a funny thing. Should some of the more vocal supporters of a Yes vote dare to express any degree of satisfaction at a couple of dozen journalists’ jobs being lost on a Unionist newspaper, social media is suddenly aflame with pious, angry lectures about the poor taste of rejoicing in others’ unemployment – regardless of whether it might perhaps have been caused by the paper’s own unethical actions.
But when tens of thousands of blameless oil workers face unemployment just before Christmas, it’s proving all but impossible for Unionists to keep a lid on their glee.
There’s only one person on Earth currently more hated by The Sun than Russell Brand (against whom it runs a substantial attack piece roughly every other day), and that’s Vladimir Putin. So the paper’s been almost as delighted by the recently plummeting oil price as Scottish Labour and Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, because it can revel in the trouble the collapse causes Putin.
Today its main politics lead is a full-on gloat about the dreadful state Russia is in at the moment, giving up half a page to an eye-catching graphic.
It must be hoping people don’t look at those numbers too closely.
Hang on a minute. We just got yet another begging email from Labour.
Those vacancies sound familiar. The amount, not so much. £87,500?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
